So, do current climate models incorporate the sort of non-linear melting of ice on Greenland that we witnessed in this clip? 4+ cubic KM broke up and floated away in 75 minutes. It might take 75+ days for it all to melt, but that event only hastens the flow of the entire glacial mass behind this piece.

My limited understanding is that the models do currently try to account for these effects, but the data behind them is poor. It's hard to measure what is going on, so both the models themselves and the ability to validate the models are limited.

Nurse Jacintha Saldanha wrote three emotional notes revealing the anguish that led to her suicide after she was duped by two Aussie DJs into believing they were royalty.

In one, the distraught mum-of-two outlines how she struggled to come to terms with the prank call by Mel Greig and Michael Christian to the hospital where pregnant Duchess Kate was being treated for severe morning sickness.

But in another she ­criticises senior colleagues at the King Edward VII hospital over her ­treatment after the pair had pretended to be the Queen and Prince Charles asking about the ­duchess's condition. That note is said to have left her family furious.

the other shoe drops... i can well imagine the nature of the 'support' that oily spokesman from the hospital talked about.

Who Could Have Predicted?

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

I wonder if there is a European version of Dr. Spock, or if his theories extended globally. I found his book to be very useful, especially at those times of midnight terror/frustration/anger that seem to be part of child-rearing...

"Growing up, I experienced unschooling as a compromise," I concluded, "the more appealing of the two extremes available in Georgia given my family's modest budget: staying at home and teaching myself, or going to public school and having my spirit crushed.

Our entire media circus is blaring three rings of navel-gazing teary sympathy for non-Syrian parents whose children have been killed by crazed gunmen.

Hanky supplies have been wiped out. Civilization is toppling. The National Rifle Association is in emergency mode, but don't worry, in a few days the threats to legislators will all be in place, and nothing will be done, and we can return to ten-car crashes on the freeway.

Car crashes don't kill as many people as guns, in ten American states.

Everybody uses cars every day. They are everywhere. Families ride around in them. My neighbor lady probably takes at least six trips a day ferrying her offspring around.

And yet guns, which are mostly kept out of sight, and owned by a minority of the population (well, technically about half), kill more people. Oh, excuse me, people with guns kill more people than people with cars.

Does this cross the line from merely bad journalism to actual intent to mislead?

Another new factor is bedevilling efforts to read the Italian runes: an acerbic, grey-bearded comedian called Beppe Grillo. An accountant by training, Mr Grillo, 64, became a comedian by accident and was one of the most bankable stand-ups on Italian television in the 1980s. But his political intelligence and knowledge of the world of money frequently erupted through the gags, and in a country where satire is a risky vocation he found himself banned from the airwaves after teasing the Socialist Party under its then leader Bettino Craxi about corruption.

Turning his back on TV, he built a huge new audience through live shows in which anti-establishment political content steadily elbowed aside the comedy. His obsessions were legion: polluting rubbish incinerators, freedom of speech, non-renewable terms for MPs, expansion of public transport and green areas of cities.

The Indy is very good at some things and terrible at others. The Middle East coverage c/o Fisk and Cockburn is exemplary, some of their political writers are really very good with Owen Jones becoming compulsory reading.

Against that, their european coverage is bizarre and their economic writers are sometimes the wrongest of the wrong. Particularly Hamish McRae who is a brilliant guide for predicting the opposite of what will happen

A senior police officer has broken ranks to describe how he and others were "appalled" at the behaviour of colleagues during the miners' strike as calls mount for a fresh inquiry into the policing of the dispute.

The former Cleveland Constabulary officer said he was so disillusioned with the behaviour of a number of police towards striking miners that he asked to be excused from attending picket lines during the 1984/85 dispute.

"I was appalled at the conduct of a number of officers, generally members of the Metropolitan police who we described as the Banana Squad - all bent and yellow," said the officer in a letter to Labour MP Ian Lavery.

Meanwhile, the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, has been offered the full support of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, with both intent on getting justice over the role of South Yorkshire police in the manipulation of evidence and "fitting up" innocent people.

Hillsborough campaign organiser Sheila Coleman said that any examination of the policing during the stadium disaster in 1989 would need to include policing tactics and attitude displayed during the miners' strike.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, is facing new accusations of homophobia in his party over its links with anti-gay, far-right European politicians and claims that he has backed a populist Polish priest who describes homosexual men as "sodomites".

Farage - whose party has shot up to 14% in an Opinium/Observer opinion poll today - vowed last week to exploit Conservative divisions over gay marriage, while insisting that his party "respects the rights of gay people to have civil partnerships". Its poll surge is a serious worry for Conservatives ahead of the 2014 European elections, from which Farage believes his party can emerge with the highest share of the vote of any UK party. Ukip's support is now almost half that of the Tories, who stand on 29%, 10 points behind Labour on 39%. The Liberal Democrats are on 8%.

While Farage is keen to portray Ukip as tolerant of gay people at home, investigations by the Observer show that it is in alliance in the European parliament with parties containing politicians who have expressed open hostility to homosexuals. Farage himself has been linked to a campaign in Poland supportive of hardline Catholic media outlets that are strongly critical of homosexuality

On a personal note (is there any other kind in the Trilobite universe?), I twisted my ankle in a manner that one might call laughable, but that shall remain extraneous to the narrative as long as I have anything to do with it. Which I shall have.

I am confined to quarters, and may now have an honest reason for non-attendance of a movie premiere tomorrow, to which I contributed some biblical readings in hell and brimstone style - without knowing what the movie was about. I suspect it is scandalous and that a little bit of space between myself and its makers could be useful.

Having already professed to all and sundry that I am of the Druze Liberal persuasion, I can't really refuse to help someone who might have similar views to mine. He's young, passionate, and just about ready for some paradigm shifting intrusions in the form of self-created 'big mistakes' - but that's how we learn, after all. Who am I to interrupt his education?

I hope your kitchen, refrigerator and pantry are well stocked and that you do not need to go out for a while. Severe sprains can take longer to heal than some breaks. I hope you have some way to keep it elevated while doing something entertaining/distracting. I have a long history of bad sprains, dating back to per-adolescence when they often occurred while I was out walking around the countryside a mile or more from home. I learned to wait until the immediate pain subsided some and then to carefully make it back home as quickly as possible.

Ever since I encountered my first example of a climate disruption denier I've wondered what kind of person could deny the reality that is industrial climate disruption. Over the years of writing on climate, however, it became clear that there were two groups of people who made up the majority of the serious deniers - libertarians and engineers of various stripes.
[.....]
But Iyer et al indicate that this moral good is not well measured by traditional studies of morality, writing that "standard morality scales... do a poor job of measuring libertarian values" and that "if liberty is included as a moral value, libertarians are not amoral." The flip side of this statement, however, means that libertarians do not share a common moral framework with either liberals or conservatives.

The data in Iyer et al demonstrate that libertarians have a similar profile (the relative order of importance of various values) to liberals on one test of moral values, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ). Specifically, libertarians rate fairness highest, followed by harm, and both groups value authority and purity the least. But Iyer et al indicates that libertarians don't think about fairness and harm in the same ways that liberals do - harm to a liberal often means injury to someone else, while harm to a libertarian means injury to the libertarian by others. Conservatives valued authority and being associated with the "in" group the most, above both harm and fairness.

I think engineering overall attracts people who are conservative. They do their homework, put in their required hours, follow the dress code, do what the boss says, and then complain when others don't do the same thing. They expect (in the U.S.) to buy their own house in the suburbs, get occasional promotions, not be laid off, and then at 65 get a retirement package that sets them up for the subsequent 30 years.

(Wanna see a severely disturbed engineer? Find one who was laid off. Or one who is retired and is looking now for the first time at his retirement financial situation.)

Anything that looks like it might disrupt that scenario is threatening. And any reasonable response that society might make to the problems of climate change is extremely disruptive. It's possible that engineers might see, perhaps limited to their own narrow viewpoint, but still, within that viewpoint, the very gigantic social disruption that is going to happen in the next 50 years if the projections are even close to being true.

I suppose you shouldn't expect perfect accuracy in this sort of situation, but it is a bit of a stretch to associate the Ku Klux Klan with the Freemasons--as is suggested by the hooded guys with the masonic symbols. Both groups are, or were, anti-Catholic, and they probably had significant membership overlap, but beyond that the connection is not very tight...

But the association of conventional businessman (brief case), Klansmen, and Masons is probably correct...

I'm not sure it's a direct reference to the KKK. It made me think of the Catholic penitent brotherhoods. The hood would symbolise masked anonymity, but there might also be an ironic reflection on the pseudo-religious trappings of Masonic ritual.